


This One Happiness

by ellebeedarling



Series: Spectre Requisitions 2018 [4]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Developing Relationship, Falling In Love, Fluff, Friends With Benefits, Happy Ending, M/M, Memory Loss, Mild Angst, PTSD, Sexual Content, believe it or not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-10
Updated: 2018-02-10
Packaged: 2019-03-16 07:02:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13631121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellebeedarling/pseuds/ellebeedarling
Summary: Zaeed had known going into this thing that it was all about stress relief, finding that bastion of relative peace in the midst of a raging shitstorm. Their lives were brutal, demanding, chaotic. They leapt from one disaster straight into another, day in and day out, and during the brief downtime between missions, while the ship hurtled them into yet another fiasco of a situation, they found a sort of solace in each other.





	This One Happiness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [commanderlurker (honeybee592)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/honeybee592/gifts).



> This was incredibly fun for me to write. I love this pairing and can't seem to get enough. The story spans ME2 through Post-War and was loosely based off this prompt (though I think I got a bit carried away):
> 
> I love the idea of Shepard and Zaeed blowing of steam together. No strings attached, both chill adults, both knowing what they’re getting into.
> 
> -FWB during the Collector mission  
> -After a FWB arrangement during the Collector mission, they cross paths during the Reaper war and hook up again  
> -Zaeed develops Feelings after he and Shep hook up during the Collector mission. Happy for this to be bittersweet if --Shepard doesn’t feel the same, but please let Shepard not be a dick to him.  
> -Zaeed being Shepard’s date for the Citadel casino mission.
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

_ There is only one happiness: to love and be loved.  _

_ ~George Sand _

 

* * *

 

 

__

Zaeed had known going into this thing that it was all about stress relief, finding that bastion of relative peace in the midst of a raging shitstorm. Their lives were brutal, demanding, chaotic. They leapt from one disaster straight into another, day in and day out, and during the brief downtime between missions, while the ship hurtled them into yet another fiasco of a situation, they found a sort of solace in each other. 

 

It was a place where both of them could find some breathing room, and with the way Shepard’s breath tumbled out of his chest, all ragged and tattered like the uniform shirt Zaeed had ripped off him moments ago, he knew it had become a necessity for both of them. By now, it was as essential as food, water, and sleep. 

 

Here in this room, Zaeed could forget who he was, what they were facing, and lose himself in the slide of his cock into Shepard’s ass. In long, powerful legs wrapped around him, urging him closer, in muscled arms squeezing him so tight breathing became a chore. In this room, the Collectors didn’t exist, the Reapers sure as fuck didn’t exist, and Shepard only had eyes for Zaeed. 

 

In here, he could pretend.

 

He could pretend that those sapphire eyes held even an ounce of the devotion that Zaeed felt, even though all he saw reflected back to him was lust and want. He could pretend that when Shepard gasped his name as he came that it held a secret, hidden meaning, carried some weight of emotion, other than simple relief. He could pretend that when it was all over and Shepard kissed him with those full, pouty lips that just felt and tasted so goddamn good, that it was to convey some depth of affection - maybe even love, rather than gratitude for being a distraction for an hour or so. 

 

Shepard grinned at him, that lazy, half-smile that Zaeed couldn’t resist kissing one last time. “Thanks,” he murmured, eyes half lidded with exhaustion, satisfaction written in the lines of his face. 

 

“Any time,” Zaeed told him, just like always. With gentle hands, Shepard began pushing him away, and Zaeed took his cue, rolling off the Commander and flopping onto the other side of the bed. Shepard would expect him to be gone by the time he got out of the shower, and Zaeed would be. Just like always. 

 

He watched the younger man ascend the stairs to the bathroom, in all his naked glory. His ass looked divine, and Zaeed knew he’d dream about it again tonight, just like he had every fucking night since they’d started this mess. 

 

Pausing at the top, Shepard turned to face him, an almost shy smile on his face. It was such a stark contrast to his typical, hardened expression. “Care to join me?” he asked, eyes flicking over Zaeed’s naked body, sprawled on the bed. 

 

“Better not,” Zaeed said, catching the faintest glimmer of disappointment in Shepard’s eyes. He looked away, rising to begin the hunt for his clothing, and when he looked back, Shepard was gone. The sound of the shower running was muffled through the bathroom door, and Zaeed took the opportunity to bolt. 

 

He needed to get away, things had become too much. He was way too fucking attached to this kid who personified the word  _ hero _ . Zaeed didn’t know when the hell things had gotten so fucking complicated. 

 

**

 

Shepard was gone, arrested. Turned himself in to the Alliance for doing his fucking job, like the noble son of a bitch he was. Zaeed hated him for all that idealistic bullshit, taking the moral high-ground and other idiotic principles that only led to the kid getting hurt, used, and abused. 

 

If he knew anything about John Shepard, he knew that the man was a soldier through and through, an Alliance man to the bone. He’d sell his bloody soul to the devil to prove his loyalty, despite what his supposed friend on Horizon had said. Everything Shepard did was for the greater good. Always fighting and sacrificing himself over and over again because it was the right fucking thing to do. 

 

Zaeed was envious. To have such a clear cut goal laid out before him, a guiding force that showed him which way to turn, which decision to make next. That bloody sense of morality that had dragged him back from Aratoht with hollow eyes and guilt written clearly on his face like a goddamn beacon. 

 

His own life hadn’t been guided by much of anything save burning anger and a consuming need for vengeance. Vido Santiago and everyone like him in the whole fucking galaxy needed to pay, needed to suffer. That was the type of justice Zaeed had devoted his life to meting out. 

 

Watching Shepard wrestle with the weight of what he’d done to those batarians had twisted in his heart like a double-edged knife, killing him slowly until he’d pulled Shepard up off the couch and kissed that kicked-puppy expression right off his face. He’d then proceeded to fuck him within an inch of his life until Shepard had passed out from exhaustion and grief, but with a sated body and mind too blissed out to worry about anything else. 

 

Zaeed had watched him sleep then, the worry and stress melting away in peaceful slumber. Gentle fingers stroked and caressed the sleeping man, and his heart welled with the need to protect Shepard, from Cerberus, from the Alliance, hell, even from himself. 

 

“Goddamn idiot,” he mumbled into the darkened room, voice gruff with emotion he didn’t want to acknowledge. 

 

He knew where he stood in Shepard’s eyes. Zaeed was a distraction, a source of comfort during a difficult time, and he needed to learn to live with that. It was the arrangement they’d agreed upon, after all. Only somewhere along the way, the lines had gotten blurred, the signals crossed. He was sure Shepard didn’t feel the same, but that didn’t stop his own heart from aching with its desire to have all of Shepard, every part of him. 

 

But Zaeed didn’t  _ know _ Shepard. Not really. He knew that beneath the legend and myth there was a flesh and blood man with doubts and insecurities just like anyone. Zaeed knew what Shepard tasted like, how he felt underneath his fingertips. He knew the sounds Shepard made in the throes of passion as he fucked him and stroked his cock. He was intimately familiar with the way Shepard’s face contorted just before he came, lips parting and brow furrowing, and he’d memorized the sound - somewhere between a sigh and a groan - that Shepard made as his orgasm overtook him. All important things in Zaeed’s mind. The best things. 

 

He knew how to tell when Shepard was ready for a visit up to his cabin. Little things like the glint in his eye, the tick in his jaw, or the sly grin that told Zaeed exactly what and how he wanted him. Those things made Zaeed’s heart race and his dick throb, things that made him lick his lips in anticipation. He guessed that no one else on the fucking ship knew those things about Shepard, so in a sense he had a leg up on the rest of them. 

 

He’d learned some of what made the man tick, but Zaeed didn’t know his favorite food or movie. He had yet to figure out many of those everyday, mundane details about Shepard’s life and motivations that allowed someone to say, “I  _ know _ him.” 

 

Zaeed cursed himself for letting it come to this. He fucking knew better than to get this kind of attached to someone - a soldier and a do-gooder at that. Their lives were at opposite ends of a vast spectrum. They weren’t meant to travel this path side by side. In some fluke of science or nature, their paths had intersected for a brief time, and it had been good and beautiful. Hell, it had been bloody glorious. 

 

Now Shepard was gone, scampering back to the Alliance the first chance he got, even if that chance came in a set of shackles, and all Zaeed had left to hold onto were the memories. 

 

“Goddamn idiot.”

 

**

 

It had been close to seven months, and honestly, Zaeed had never expected to see him again. He’d set up this little farce with Cerberus and that goddamn volus ambassador who really deserved a bullet through his weasley head, in hopes that Shepard would be the one to answer the call. He hadn’t actually thought it would work. 

 

The memories of those nights aboard the  _ Normandy _ , tucked up inside Shepard’s tight body as they’d hidden themselves away from the realities of their lives, had nearly faded by now. But everything flooded right back in, sweeping away the barriers Zaeed had erected to protect himself, the minute he’d locked eyes with those sweet baby blues. 

 

There it was again, that spark in those eyes that told Zaeed the man was ready to pick right back up where they’d left off, and he wasn’t about to let the chance to hold John Shepard in his arms once more pass him by. 

 

Two hours later, he opened the door of his dingy hotel room to find the Savior of the Citadel standing on the other side. The place was a total shithole, but neither man seemed to care. They moved of one accord, closing the distance between them, and when their lips met, Zaeed heard the unrelenting voice in the back of his head that told him he’d just come home. He ignored it in favor of pushing his tongue past Shepard’s lips and dragging him toward the bed. 

 

Seven months of longing that Zaeed had channeled into tracking bounties finally found their fulfilment when he slid into Shepard’s body. Shepard groaned with relief and desire all wound together, and Zaeed melded their lips once more, drinking in the tiny gasps and moans Shepard made as he fucked into him with bruising force. It had only ever been this way. Fast and rough and hard as many times as they could both get it up in the scant hour or so that they’d managed to carve out for their reprieve. 

 

Shepard bucked and bowed beneath him, muttering curses and pawing at Zaeed’s body until they both came with mind-blowing force. Zaeed collapsed on top of the man, body sated and mind at ease for the first time in seven months. 

 

In a surprising move, Shepard wrapped his arms around him, pressing the softest kiss against Zaeed’s temple. He didn’t dare let himself hope. Life had a way of yanking the carpet of his hopes and dreams right out from under his feet, and he couldn’t afford to let himself be hopeful where Shepard was concerned. 

 

But then he went and shocked Zaeed again. “I missed you,” he murmured directly into the older man’s ear. “It was lonely as hell without you there.” 

 

Zaeed leaned up, hands braced against the mattress on either side of Shepard’s head. “Missed me, huh? What? There was no good dick to be had in Vancouver?” 

 

The soft smile Shepard had been wearing vanished, and he immediately began to push Zaeed away. The merc cursed himself internally. They were words he’d never expected Shepard to say, much less mean, and they’d hit him in the heart, doing funny things that he wanted to ignore. They’d been exactly the words Zaeed had both wanted and feared hearing, and he’d acted like a total jackass. 

 

“I’m sorry. That was an asshole thing for me to say.” 

 

“It’s fine,” Shepard bit out, snatching his pants off the floor and shoving first one leg inside, then the other. His shirt followed quickly, Shepard tucking it in with precision and fastening up his trousers. 

 

Zaeed wanted to reach for him, to ask him to stay, but he didn’t know how to do that without sounding weak and pathetic. Shepard was central to the plot of the war; Zaeed was just another bounty hunter trying to scrape his way through the stars. They didn’t belong together, their worlds didn’t align, and yet Zaeed wanted to keep the little bubble they’d made for themselves. The one he’d just popped with his own thoughtless words. 

 

Wrapping his arms around Shepard from behind, he rested his chin on the younger man’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I didn’t think we wanted to make this more than what it is.” 

 

“I don’t,” Shepard sighed. “I mean I didn’t, I… Hell, I don’t know what I mean.” Shrugging Zaeed off, he found his socks and boots, pulling them on in record time. “See you around, Massani.”

 

He was gone again, as quickly as he’d come, and that old hollowed out ache returned just as swiftly. 

 

**

 

Zaeed hadn’t known much about Shepard before, beyond his sexual preferences, but he was learning. Everything he was finding out was a pleasant surprise. 

 

Shepard had called him two days after their little rendezvous and asked to meet him again. The Commander had rented a room at that same shitty hotel, and attacked Zaeed the moment he’d stepped through the door. They’d spent hours fucking before both of them had passed out. The difference this time was that when they’d awoken the next morning, they were still tangled together underneath the covers, Shepard’s arms wrapped tightly around Zaeed. 

 

“I’m sorry,” Zaeed muttered again when Shepard’s drowsy eyes met his. 

 

“For what?” Shepard asked as he yawned and blinked against the pale light of the bedside lamp.

 

“For the dick comment,” he stated matter-of-factly. 

 

“I told you it’s fine.” Shepard began to pull away, but Zaeed held him in place, leaning over the man and pressing a kiss to his lips. 

 

“It’s not fine. It hurt you, and… I… I don’t want to hurt you.” 

 

There was some unreadable expression in Shepard’s eyes. One Zaeed had no clue or context for how to decipher. Instead of responding, Shepard drew Zaeed in for another kiss, slow and lazy, and so out of character for their usual interactions. Zaeed wasn’t complaining, however. His heart sang as his body responded to Shepard’s gentle touches, and soon, Shepard was straddling him, grinding their rigid dicks together as Zaeed’s hands wandered, and they kissed as though their lives depended on it. 

 

He didn’t want to over analyze anything. He had a good thing going with Shepard, one he’d expected to end along with the mission to stop the Collectors. John Shepard was unpredictable, however, and Zaeed tucked that information away on his ever-growing list of “shit I didn’t know about Shepard but am glad to find out.” 

 

“What do you say to a shower and some breakfast?” Shepard asked, breathless and still trembling after their orgasms. “My treat.” 

 

There was no way in hell Zaeed would have said no to that.

 

After a long night and morning of fucking, Zaeed was famished, but he found that Shepard was downright gluttonous, practically inhaling his mound of bacon, eggs, and pancakes and washing it down with an astonishing amount of coffee. Shepard blathered on all through the meal, between mouthfuls of sticky, greasy breakfast foods, about how things were going with the war and the mission, about the new crew, and the return of that asswipe on Horizon. Zaeed bristled when Shepard spoke of Kaidan Alenko and how much he’d come to rely on the man. 

 

But if he’d found an alternative ‘stress-relief’ situation, he didn’t speak of it. Zaeed wondered for a moment how he’d feel if Shepard did have another… fuck buddy? Whatever the hell they were to each other, they’d certainly never bothered to label it. This was the most time they’d spent together outside of missions or the bedroom. 

 

“How was Vancouver?” Zaeed asked if only to get Shepard to stop talking about Alenko and his  _ integrity _ . 

 

“Well, there was no good dick to be had,” he said with a bitter note, dropping his fork and finishing off his third or fourth cup of coffee. Zaeed had lost count. 

 

The merc cringed and debated apologizing again, but Shepard’s next words stopped him cold. 

 

“Not that I wanted any,” the younger man mumbled mostly to himself, but Zaeed wasn’t so old and hard of hearing that he didn’t pick up on it. 

 

“What was that?” he asked, just to hear it one more time. 

 

Shepard’s head came up, blue eyes blazing. “I said I didn’t want any… anyone else,” he finished, a challenge written across his face. “I didn’t… and I  _ don’t _ want to be with anyone else. If you don’t feel the same, that’s fine, but-”

 

Zaeed leaned across the table and shut Shepard up with a kiss. It was sticky with pancake syrup and bitter with coffee, but so bloody perfect. When he sat back down, Shepard was grinning like a Cheshire cat. “I think I have that room for one more hour,” he said.

 

“I’ll pay for another goddamn night,” Zaeed told him, relishing the light that sprang into Shepard’s eyes. 

 

**

 

“Why am I doing this again?” Zaeed asked, tugging at the too-tight collar of his suit. 

 

“Would you rather Alenko or Vega be my date for this thing tonight?” 

 

Zaeed scowled as the Commander did up the top button on his suit jacket. There was a hint of teasing in the man’s sapphire eyes, and Zaeed slapped him on the ass. 

 

“Let’s go.” 

 

They made their way directly to the bar, and Zaeed found out that Shepard’s drink of choice was beer. He wasn’t sure why that surprised him. He watched as Shepard sipped from the bottle, eyes scanning the crowds for anything suspicious that might interfere with their plans. 

 

Shepard looked good in a suit. Good enough to distract Zaeed from their true purpose here. He sidled closer to the man - his lover, and what a thrill that thought gave him - and slipped an arm around his waist. Raising his glass, he toasted the new turn their relationship had taken. The expression Shepard wore was full of an affection that Zaeed didn’t really want to contemplate. They were moving forward at a snail’s pace, but they were moving forward. That was enough for Zaeed at the moment. Reading into Shepard’s gestures and motivations was unwise, better to just take everything at face value for now. 

 

Shepard leaned in for a kiss, a carefree smile plastered to his lips. That was the moment that Brooks chose to interrupt them. The rest of the night was a series of stops and starts and interruptions. Zaeed managed to pull Shepard into a darkened alcove for a quick makeout session that left them both breathless before Brooks called for their aid yet again. Other than that, Shepard was mostly business. 

 

They got sucked into a few conversations with hoity toity lawyers and politicians, and Zaeed was awed by Shepard’s diplomacy time and again. Shepard had it all. He was gorgeous, one of the best soldiers and strategists Zaeed had ever met, and he could put any bullshitter in their place. He took them down with well-thought arguments, laced with a sarcasm that went right over their heads. Always, they walked away utterly oblivious to the fact that their reasoning had just been blown out of the water. They were just happy to have been talked to by the first human Spectre.

 

He couldn’t help wondering what an amazing man like Shepard saw in an old merc like himself, but then John would catch his eye, his heart would flip, and he found he no longer gave a damn why it was happening. The important thing was that it  _ had  _ happened. Shepard wanted him, and that was the only thing Zaeed cared about. 

 

**

 

He’d never been one for long goodbyes, but this was probably the most significant goodbye of his life. Everything boiled down to these last few hours, just a handful of precious moments that they’d managed to make for each other before the end. 

 

Shepard lay beneath him, blue eyes gazing through his thick lashes. He bestowed reverent kisses against the scars of Zaeed’s cheek before tracing them with his fingertip. In turn, Zaeed mapped the muscles of Shepard’s chest, the scars from healed over bullet and knife wounds that told the tale of just how dangerous their lives were. 

 

Zaeed had never stopped to think about what would happen if he ever lost this. Before, there hadn’t been anything for him to lose. Only an ambiguous desire to have something more than a loose arrangement for alleviating the strain their lives inevitably carried. Now it was more, so much more than he’d ever dared to dream of. 

 

He didn’t know what love was, but he suspected it might feel something like this. 

 

As he moved in and out of Shepard’s body, slow and purposeful in a way they’d never attempted before, all he could think of was the yearning in his chest. Deep down, he didn’t want the end to come, and as much as he tried to be present here in this moment with Shepard, his mind kept drifting to a thousand different what-ifs and wishes for a future that wasn’t ever likely to happen. 

 

“Where are you?” Shepard asked, cupping both Zaeed’s cheeks in his hands and forcing their eyes to meet. 

 

“Sorry, just-”

 

Shepard brought their lips together, whisking the worries and fears from Zaeed’s mind.  The future was out there. Win or lose, it was out of their hands for the moment, and if this was the last time he ever felt Shepard’s lips on his, he’d be damned if he’d waste it worrying about things that were beyond their control. 

 

Instead, he focused on the man below him, greedily savoring the moans, pants, and gasps he managed to coax from him. Shepard held onto him for dear life, fingers digging into tired muscle and sinew. Zaeed drank that up, too. From the near desperate look in his eyes, to the way his body arched and molded into his, he locked it all away, never expecting to experience it first hand again. 

 

When it was over, they held each other through the night, both of them dreading the morning and the end.

 

**

 

He’d been fighting on the southern end of London, trying to work his way to where Shepard’s Hammer Squad was making the final push, when a blinding red light flashed from the sky. Everyone around him dove for cover, but Zaeed knew, even before the husks that had been swarming the squad he’d latched onto began to keel over. 

 

Shepard had done it. He’d won. Somehow, the bastard had managed to outwit the machines and give the galaxy a chance to live and breathe again. Zaeed closed his eyes as the troops around him began to cry and cheer. His mind carried him back just two short nights ago, though it felt like a lifetime, when he’d held John Shepard, and made love to him in a way he’d never done with anyone else in his entire life. 

 

It only took a few minutes for their comms to crackle to life with the news that no one in the galaxy wanted to here: Shepard - their hero - was gone, and the  _ Normandy _ with him. A somberness fell over the crowds of people around him. Weeping, for what their victory had cost them, rose in the misty pre-dawn fog of London. 

 

Zaeed skirted the edges of the crowd and began picking his way toward Shepard’s last known location. Sorrow filled his heart, unlike anything he’d ever felt before. 

 

It was over. 

 

**

 

It took four days to find Shepard in the rubble of the Citadel, barely clinging to life with that goddamn, infamous tenacity of his. 

 

Zaeed busted his ass all day hauling piles of rubble off to the burn pits set up around the outside of the city, so that room could be made for new construction. Like sickly flowers, the skeletons of new buildings appeared practically overnight. They were hastily finished and glossed over with terrible paint jobs because people needed shelter from the harsh weather conditions created by the hazy layer of ash in the atmosphere. 

 

At night, he kept vigil by Shepard’s bed, watching over the man through the flickering light of the bedside lamp. The power systems were shoddy at best. Life support machines were hooked up to generators pilfered from god knew where, but everything else, including lighting, relied on the city’s faulty power grid. Many nights only the dull light of the moon - what little of it could penetrate the debris field - was the only thing to keep him company through the long, lonely nights. 

 

In his dreams he heard Shepard calling for him, saw those brilliant blue eyes staring up from underneath him, kissed the crooked smile that always appeared after his orgasm. But when he awoke, Shepard was silent, eyes closed, lips a pale, thin line across his face, lost in the sea of glowing orange scars. 

 

The cycle continued for four torturous months. Months in which the galaxy held its breath in anticipation of the day when Shepard would wake and they could all show him the gratitude he deserved. For Zaeed it was more personal than that. He’d never had the chance - never  _ taken _ the chance - to tell Shepard he loved him, and he was too proud to take the coward’s route of whispering it to the walls in the dark of night. He contented himself with kissing the back of Shepard’s hand and making promises to himself about how they’d spend the rest of their days once this nightmare was finally over. 

 

Only the nightmare didn’t end when Shepard awoke. His memories of the last ten years or so were just gone. He could remember everything, down to the minutest detail, up to a point, but it was a point long before he’d ever met Zaeed Massani. It was before they’d known each other, before they’d made that stupid, fucking arrangement to blow off steam together. It was before Zaeed knew what Shepard felt and tasted like, before he’d foolishly let himself fall in love.

 

Before his last night with Shepard, he hadn’t know what love felt like. Before Shepard woke in a London hospital, he hadn’t know what heartbreak felt like either. 

 

He wasn’t sure which was worse. 

 

One made him feel like his heart was no longer his own; the other like his heart had been ripped from his chest and trampled under a herd of wild klixen. 

 

The doctors prattled on about hope and a prognosis, and all the while Zaeed contemplated just buggering off. He’d get lost for good somewhere out in the Terminus systems where one could live a life of solitude. There, he could hide from the ghosts of things he should have known would be denied to him. Eventually, he’d die, alone and forgotten by the one person in the whole bloody galaxy that he actually  _ wanted _ to remember him. 

 

It was Jack who literally knocked some sense into him. 

 

Crappy dives had opened up all over the city the minute the vultures had been able to bottle up the first batches of bathtub hooch. The world had been saved, but for what? 

 

The aliens bickered over who was getting preferential treatment while their respective species were all stuck in a foreign solar system that couldn’t provide for all their needs. The politicians argued over what to do next, while the average, ordinary citizen scraped and scrounged for enough food and water to survive for another wretched day. 

 

Zaeed had never been an optimist, but the new reality everyone was facing was even bleaker than anything he could have imagined. Shepard had nearly died, had lost his leg and his memory, and for fucking what? So he could watch the people he’d fought and sacrificed for die of hunger and exposure? He admitted for the first time that it was a small mercy that Shepard had no memory of the last few years. 

 

Jack found him brooding on a barstool, drowning his sorrows in some of the worst liquor he’d ever tasted. The swill was definitely not worth all they’d gone through to win the damn war. In a moment of weakness, he drunkenly confessed his plan to hop a shuttle off world sometime in the next few days so that he could see his grim intentions come to fruition. 

 

In a furious rage, Jack yanked him off his barstool and punched him square in the jaw. Zaeed had heard how she’d done the same to Shepard when he’d gotten out of prison. Maybe it was her life’s ambition to show men the error of their ways. Zaeed had no clue. The only things he did know were that she had one hell of a right hook, and she also had a point. 

 

Dragging him back to the ramshackle building she’d staked her claim in, Jack brewed him a pot of coffee stronger than engine fuel. There was something touching about her sharing her meager rations with him, but he didn’t let himself dwell on that. She lectured him for half the night about how Shepard needed him now more than ever. The doctors had laid it on the line for all of the crew - Shepard’s family. He’d need them - particularly those closest to him - in order to have any hope of regaining his memories and learning to be self-sufficient. 

 

“No fuckin’ way am I going to let you pussy out on him now,” she finished, holding him in place with an impressive glare. 

 

Zaeed stared into the murky black depths of his coffee cup and nodded slowly. He’d never done anything selfless in his life, but for Shepard… For Shepard, he’d do anything within his power to see the man restored to full health. Even if it meant Shepard never looked at him with eyes full of love again. 

 

**

 

It took four years...

 

...four years of grueling physical therapy, weekly doctor’s appointments, and intense therapy sessions, for Shepard to finally feel like a healed man -  a whole man despite his missing leg. His memory had trickled back in slowly, and it had only taken him a few months to remember Zaeed -  _ everything _ about Zaeed. It had taken many more months, many arguments, and even a fist fight or two for them to settle into some semblance of what they’d shared together before the war’s end. 

 

The first time they’d attempted sex had turned into a bit of a disaster. Shepard hid his insecurities under a mask of anger, and Zaeed knew shit about how to make him feel better. He’d never had to convince someone that they were worthy of love and devotion before, and the fact that it was  _ Shepard _ needing that reassurance, threw him for a loop. 

 

Still, they struggled, staggered, and stumbled along until one day it became easier. Zaeed held him through the night, through nightmares and the return of his memories. He helped him relearn how to do simple things like shower and piss by himself now that he was down to one leg. 

 

Shepard reminded him constantly how humiliating it all was for him, how useless and restless he felt. Zaeed, in turn, reminded Shepard that he loved him and that there was nothing they couldn’t work through together. 

 

After four years of beating his body, mind, and heart back into submission, Shepard was ready to get away from London and the reconstruction of everything the war had destroyed. He’d come to Zaeed in his wheelchair, wringing his hands as they rested in his lap. “Take me away from here,” he said simply. 

 

“Where do you want to go?” 

 

“Anywhere that’s not here.” 

 

So they left - packed up some essential supplies leaving most of their belongings in the rented pre-fab they’d come to call home. If the look in Shepard’s eyes was anything to go by, the chances that they’d ever return were slim and none, but they had each other. That was the important thing. The rest was just stuff. 

 

They ended up on Anhur, in the Eagle Nebula, in a secluded cabin tucked up in the mountains. It was one of those cursed places where snow fell for the majority of the year, but Shepard fell in love with the “quaintness.” Zaeed understood that to mean he was happy about the privacy, and even Zaeed had to admit the place came with a fucking fantastic view. 

 

A large deck overlooked a wooded valley, outlined by rolling hills and the brilliant blue sky on the horizon. He could picture many years of sitting with Shepard and drinking a beer while steaks sizzled away on the barbeque. Even the prospect of chopping and hauling firewood couldn’t dim his enthusiasm for it. 

 

They stood at the balcony railing, bodies pressed close as they wrapped an arm around each other’s waist. Zaeed felt a strange new emotion gurgling around deep in his chest. In his life he’d known rage and complacency, sorrow and contentment, but he didn’t think he’d ever felt honest to god  _ happy _ a day in his life. 

 

Shepard took in the view from their new home with a serene smile on his face, and Zaeed felt an extraordinary mix of things that all boiled down to this delirious joy, this one, consuming happiness, that made all the years of heartache and struggle worth every effort. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> I want to take a moment to thank my awesome beta, [estalfaed](http://estalfaed.tumblr.com). You're amazing sweetie!


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